“Does that mean you’ve listened to a word I said, or are you just going to leave when it suits you, regardless?”
He reached up to lower his visor. “You should do all that you can to get the others to safety, whether it’s aboard the ship or further from the bay.”
“That’s it, then, is it? Those that we haven’t moved will just have to take their chances?”
“None of this is easy for me.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to wait until we can get everyone to safety.”
“But it might, Antoinette. It might do exactly that.”
Antoinette turned away in disgust. “Remember what I told you last time? I was wrong. I see it now, even if I didn’t then.”
“What was that exactly?”
She looked back at him. She felt spiteful and reckless. “I said you’d paid for your crimes. I said you’d done it a hundred thousand times over. Nice dream, John, but it wasn’t true, was it? You didn’t care a damn about those people. It was only ever about saving yourself.”
The Captain did not answer her. He pulled down the visor and vanished back into the storm, still angling his body against the tremendous lacerating force of that invisible wind. And Antoinette began to wonder whether this visit hadn’t after all been a grave mistake, exactly the sort of reckless behaviour that her father had always warned her about.
“No joy,” she told her companions back in the High Conch.
Around the table sat a quorum of colony seniors. She did not notice any obvious absences except for Pellerin, the swimmer. Even Scorpio was now present. It was the first she had seen of him since Clavain’s death, and there was, Antoinette thought, something in his gaze that she had never seen there before. Even when he looked directly at her his eyes were focused on something distant and almost certainly hostile—a glint on some imagined horizon, an enemy sail or the gleam of armour. She had seen that look somewhere else recently, but it took her a moment to remember where. The old man had been sitting in the same place at the table, fixated on the same remote threat. It had taken years of pain and suffering to bring Clavain to that state, but only days to do it to the pig.
Antoinette knew that something awful had happened in the iceberg. She had flinched from the details. When the others had told her she did not need to know—that she was much better off not knowing—she had decided to believe them. But although she had never been very good at reading the expressions of pigs, in Scorpio’s face half the story was already laid out for her inspection, the horror anatomised if only she had the wit to read the signs.
“What did you tell him?” Scorpio asked.
“I told him we’d be looking at tens of thousands of casualties if he decided to lift off.”
“And?”
“He more or less said ‘too bad.’ His only immediate concern was for the people already aboard the ship.”
“Fourteen thousand at the last count,” Blood commented.
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Vasko said. “That’s—what? Not far off a tenth of the colony already?”
Blood toyed with his knife. “You want to come and help us squeeze in the next five hundred, son, you’re more than welcome.”
“It’s that difficult?” Vasko asked.
“It gets worse with every consignment. We might manage to get it up to twenty thousand by dawn, but only if we start treating them like cattle.”
‘They’re human beings,“ Antoinette said. ”They deserve better treatment than that. What about the freezers? Aren’t they helping?“
“The caskets aren’t working as well as they used to,” Xavier Liu said, addressing his wife exactly as he would any other colony senior. “Once they’re cooled down they’re OK, but putting someone under means hours of supervision and tinkering. There’s no way to process them fast enough.”
Antoinette closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips against her eyelids. She saw turquoise rings, like ripples in water. “This is about as bad as things can get, isn’t it?” Then she reopened her eyes and tried to shake some clarity into her head. “Scorp—any contact with Remontoire?”
“Nothing.”
“But you’re still convinced he’s up there?”
“I’m not convinced of anything. I’m merely acting on the best intelligence I have.”
“And you think we’d have seen a sign by now, some attempt to communicate with us, if he were up there.”
“Khouri was that sign,” Scorpio said.
‘Then why haven’t they sent down someone else?“ Antoinette replied. ”We need to know, Scorp: do we sit tight or get the hell off Ararat?“
“Believe me, I’m aware of the options.”
“We can’t wait for ever,” Antoinette said, frustration seeping into her voice. “If Remontoire loses the battle, we’ll be looking at a sky full of wolves. No way out once that happens, even if they don’t touch Ararat. We’ll be locked in.”
“As I said, I’m aware of the options.”
She had heard the menace in his voice. Of course he was aware. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just… don’t know what else we can do.”
No one spoke for a while. Outside, an aircraft swept low overhead, curving away with another consignment of refugees. Antoinette did not know if they were being taken to the ship or the far side of the island. Once the need to get people to safety had been recognised, the evacuation effort had been split down the middle.
“Did Aura offer anything useful?” Vasko asked.
Scorpio turned to him, the leather of his uniform creaking. “What sort of thing were you thinking of?”
“It wasn’t Khouri that was the sign,” Vasko said, “it was Aura. Khouri may know things, but Aura is the hotline. She’s the one we really need to talk to, the one who might know the right thing to do.”
“I’m glad you’ve given the matter so much consideration,” Scorpio said.
“Well?” Vasko persisted.
Antoinette stiffened. The atmosphere in the meeting room had never exactly been relaxed, but now it made the hairs on the back of her hands tingle. She had never dared speak to Scorpio like that, and she did not know many who had.
But Scorpio answered calmly. “She—Khouri—said the word again.”
“The word?” Vasko repeated.
“Hela. She’s said it several times since we revived her, but we didn’t know what it meant, or even if it had any particular significance. But there was another word this time.” Again the leather creaked as he shifted his frame. For all that he appeared disconnected from events in the room, the violence of which he was capable was a palpable thing, waiting in the wings like an actor.
“The other word?” Vasko asked.
“Quaiche,” Scorpio replied.
The woman walked to the sea. Overhead the sky was a brutal, tortured grey and the rocks under her feet were slippery and unforgiving. She shivered, more in apprehension than cold, for the air was humid and oppressive. She looked behind her, along the shoreline towards the ragged edge of the encampment. The buildings on the fringe of the settlement had a deserted and derelict air to them. Some of them had collapsed and never been reoccupied. She thought it very unlikely that there was anyone around to notice her presence. Not, of course, that it mattered in the slightest. She was entitled to be here, and she was entitled to step into the sea. The fact that she would never have asked this of her own swimmers did not mean that her actions were in any way against colony rules, or even the rules of the swimmer corps. Foolhardy, yes, and very probably futile, but that could not be helped. The pressure to do something had grown inside her like a nagging pain, until it could not be ignored.
It had been Vasko Malinin who had tipped her over the edge. Did he realise the effect his words had had?